[Blade1001]

Hi guys,

My first post here, and I'm thinking of returning to a HTPC based platform with an XBMC front end for serving my media, after about 10 years absence since I resigned my last HTPC to the bin.

After having used various off the shelf media players over the last decade, my most recent ones - Netgear NeoTV 550's - are starting to give up the ghost and randomly crashing. To my knowledge they were the only off the shelf media players that allowed full blu-ray ISO playback with full menus.

It seems things have moved on considerably since I built my last HTPC, and it is the glossy interface of the Aeon MQ5 skin that has led me here, so I am considering building a new HTPC to use this. Here is a little bit of a list of points that may be relevant:

1. I have around 360 bly-ray rips, most as ISO's, some as remuxed .mpg's. All are stored in named folders with metadata and artwork added by Media Center Master,

2. I have around 7000 music tracks all stored in flac all with metadata and .folder.jpg artwork images, including hi-res tracks at (up to) 24bit/192khz, plus some DSD downloads (I appreciate getting playback of this latter file type might be a stretch?)

3. I would like a fairly slim nice looking case that will fit in a server rack, and take a slot loading BD drive.

4. Noise is not an issue as it will be stored in a rack, but if silent is an option, that would be great.

5. All my media is stored on a 24TB NAS (Synology 2413+) and delivered over a Cat 6A network, so I do not need local storage.

6. The only output required will be HDMI and possibly coax SPDIF. The only input that will be required will be gigabit ethernet.

7. Current I rip BD's using a laptop and AnyDVD HD, and then manually copy across the network to the NAS, and then manually run MCM to grab metadata/artwork. However it would be very very nice if this could be automated, so I simply put the BD in the HTPC blu-ray drive and click a button to copy to the NAS with automatic metadata and artwork download.

8. I will need to control the player via IR.

9. I want the absolute minimum off faff and messing about tinkering with the thing. I still have nightmares and cold sweats from memories of messing around with ffdshow to get video to play properly. I really am looking to build an 'install once' solution that just 'works' once it is set-up.

10. Audio and video quality (along with convenience) are the most important factors, and must be passed out from the player untouched (with the exception of DSD which may have to be converted to PCM in player if that is possible).

11. Compatibility with, and processing power for, 4K video would be ideal - even if that means changing out the video card later on to obtain HDMI 2.0 compatibility.

12. Budget is not really an issue, I am happy to invest in the very best premium parts in order to optimise performance and audio and video quality.


With the above in mind, I would really appreciate:

1. An ideal hardware list, including some case suggestions.

2. Any factors I need to consider, or issues I may run into.

Many thanks in advance,

Gareth

[Starstream]

If money isn't an issue you dont really need to self build unless you prefer to, QuietPC do some very nice fanless HTPC systems with slot loading drives like this one or this one. You can also adjust some of the components to your liking by adding IR receivers, different CPU's etc & they will assemble it for you and ship it.

You can buy cheap optical to coax SPDIF adapters to use with the built in optical on any system.

If you have 3D Blu-ray's you will need a good CPU like a Core i5 as Kodi can only software decode these, it cannot hardware decode them. If 3D Blu-ray is not at all important you can drop to much lower price points and lower end CPU's like Celeron/Pentium units as hardware decoding for other formats takes care of the rest.

Blu-ray menu's died in media players because of Cinavia a tricky form of DRM, you must use Cinavia to get menus but it also kills audio when streaming BD over network.

There is an open source Blu-ray project called libbluray, they have made some gains with menu compatibility in v0.6.0 which might enable menu functionality on some BD's but this is down the road when it would be integrated into future versions of Kodi, not sure if Kodi v14 will be getting it or not.

For minimal messing about install Openelec on the HTPC, that is a linux OS that just runs Kodi nothing more and it will auto update itself whenever a new version is available.

[Blade1001]

Thanks Starstream, I will check out those QuietPC systems - certainly the cases look spot on, but how do their hardware choices stack up? They all seem to use the Gigabyte motherboard which has a HDMI port - is this going to produce as good a video quality as a dedicated graphics card?

How about the auto-ripping I mentioned, can this be done with the Openelec system you suggested? I'm not very well versed in Linux, so this may not be the best open for me.

[Starstream]

Intel's integrated GPU's are actually pretty decent these days so no need for a separate GPU though if your after HDMI 2.0 then your likely going to have to stick a new graphics card into the system at some point in the future when those come out.

Auto ripping I do not know about, it probably can be done by those with the right technical knowledge and modifying Openelec, for example there is autorip here which uses MakeMKV to do the job but under Windows. There is a brief comment here about installing the command line version of MakeMKV on Openelec so it may be there is something out there, I'd try asking on the Openelec forums to see if someone has already done it.